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knees, and her legs—bare!— hanging from the horse astride!
    “Let me help you,” he said, urging his horse between hers and the tree.
    “No, please,” she said, choked, turning away her head. “Just ... go away!”
    He laughed, stood on his stirrups, reached up and released the skirt. “There,” he said, tipping his hat again. “No trouble at all.”
    She pulled down the offending garment, swung a leg over the horse so that she sat sidesaddle and lowered her head. “Th-thank you, my lord,” she mumbled miserably.
    “Why, it’s Miss... Miss Branscombe, is it not?” he asked, peering at her through the raindrops and the strands of hair that fell over her face. “We met last night, I believe.”
    “Yes, I believe we d-did,” she managed.
    “This is good luck,” he said cheerfully. “I’d hoped to encounter you again.”
    “That is k-kind of you to say,” she said, pushing tendrils of hair back from her eyes and throwing a quick glance at his face, “but I would have preferred a less humiliating encounter.”
    “Why humiliating? Anyone might have gotten caught in these deuced brambles.”
    “Perhaps,” she said ruefully, “but not many would have revealed such... such bare legs.”
    “True,” he agreed with a chuckle, “but not many would have such pretty legs to reveal.”
    Though she knew he’d meant the remark as a compliment, she couldn’t take it so. It was too intimate for so brief an acquaintance. “I would have preferred,” she said as proudly as her overwhelming embarrassment permitted, “that you hadn’t seen them at all, even if they’d been covered with stockings and petticoats. Which, to my everlasting shame, they weren’t.”
    He held up a gloved hand. “Were they not? I swear I never noticed.”
    A laugh hiccoughed out of her. “You lie, my lord, but like a gentleman.”
    “What makes you think I lie?”
    “Because you say you didn’t notice the legs were bare but noticed they were pretty.”
    “I’m a gentleman, my dear, but also a man. As a gentleman, I do not take notice of ladies’ undergarments ... or the lack of them. But as a man, how can I be expected not to notice such pretty legs as yours?”
    She blushed. “Then, as a lady, I hope you will permit me to thank you for your gentlemanly discretion and to ignore the... the rest.”
    “Done,” he said, and offered his hand.
    She took it. “Thank you.” She smiled up at him timidly for a moment before removing her hand and picking up the reins. “And now I think it time we went our separate ways. You are becoming soaked.”
    “And so are you. May I not see you home?”
    “No, thank you, my lord,” she said, turning her mount about and starting off at a gallop. “You’ve seen quite enough of me for one day.”
     
     

 
     
    6
     
     
    Lord Smallwood peered over the top of his newspaper with a frown of disapproval. His daughter, who was sitting opposite him at the breakfast table nonchalantly buttering a hot raisin muffin, was, as usual, raising his hackles. Everything about her this morning, from her posture to her dress, was not what he liked. Although Lord Smallwood truly adored his daughter, he didn’t quite approve of her. Widowed when the girl was only thirteen, he was responsible for her upbringing, but he’d often secretly admitted to himself that it was she who’d raised him.
    Smallwood was a small-boned, short, soft-spoken man of sixty-two years who’d won the respect of his peers merely by the dignity of his bearing. He had fine features, a head of white hair, a retiring nature that made him avoid confrontation, and a somewhat pedantic, precise habit of mind. Yet his daughter, the twenty-one-year old beauty Miss Cleo Smallwood, had inherited none of his ways. That was the trouble.
    He shook his head at her hopelessly. She was casually leaning one elbow on the table as she attended her buttering. That girl, he said to himself, has no sense of decorum. Not only was her posture rude and